... of no political significance and what were then tiny Trotskyist groups – that Labour Party members could not join. Look, said the anti-subversion network, this shows that the communists are in control of the Labour Party! Part of the anti-subversion network took seriously claims from MI5 and CIA counterintelligence officers that Harold Wilson might be a KGB agent (though they had no evidence for this other than the suspicion of a Soviet defector). Thus among the network's members there was the picture of a trade union movement manipulated if not run by the Soviet- funded CPGB and a Labour Party, in turn funded largely by the trade unions, headed by someone who might be ...

... this is very interesting and probably important. There are a lot of striking leads in here, none of which are good news for the police or MI5; so it's not too surprising that he has been largely blanked by the major media, even though they are fascinated by spies and Symonds is the only British citizen to act as a KGB agent and return to tell the tale. Symonds was a detective in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the time when the Metropolitan Police was seriously corrupt in places, and, on his account, riddled with Freemasonry.1 Bits of the Met joined forces with the then illegal porn industry, regulating it essentially: ...

... book are similarly deceased. The bigger picture And yet......it's not all bad. Within the vast amount of text describing Livingstone's rise through local government and especially in the final 40 pages, a number of points are made. It emerges that Ken isn't really left-wing at all. We learn that the KGB looked at him in the '80s and concluded that he wasn't a Trotskyist. When he was mayor of London the mayor of Berlin concluded that none of his proposals were in the least bit radical by German standards. He provides some additional material on the nature of the Blair-Brown years that chimes with much that has now appeared. ...

... on the 1980 bombing of Bologna station by neo-fascists (probably, but not quite provably, run by the Italian agency SISMI) which killed 85 and wounded hundreds, there is nothing. He also writes on page 336 of the Red Brigades: 'For Moscow, Italy was therefore a soft target. ' Meaning what? That the KGB were running the Red Brigades? Has anyone seriously tried to claim this? I looked for other 'hot buttons'. On Allende: 'Pinochet was said [sic] to have overthrown Chilean democracy....there were voluble exiles with tales of "disappearances", of mass executions in football stadiums, of torture in dank basements ...

... and the Farewell America plot', about the events leading up to the publication of the book Farewell America about the Kennedy assassination.(2 ) This may be marginalia but it is interesting margin- alia nonetheless. Notably, former FBI agent Turner tells us: that the book may have resulted from contact between the Garrison inquiry and the KGB. Working for New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, Turner wondered what the Soviets knew about Oswald and sent someone to contact the KGB in Mexico City. (Innocent days, eh? In the midst of the most sensitive inquiry imaginable into the darkest corners of the US military-industrial-complex, they decide to contact the KGB? ...

... JFK, Nagell walked into a bank, fired two shots into the ceiling and waited for the police to come and arrest him. Years later he claimed he got himself jailed to be off the streets when JFK was killed. He claimed he had been an intelligence officer who had been working with Lee Harvey Oswald and been asked by the KGB to kill Oswald to try to derail the assassination plot. (This is the point at which I ceased to believe this tale. No way, José. The KGB didn't need to kill anyone: the Soviets had a back channel to the Kennedys through their Washington ambassador.) Russell wrote 800 pages about this, at the end ...

... heroes; the civil wars; the 'spoils system' of American politics versus the 'korm-enlie' equivalent of Tsarist bureaucracy; oligarchs versus pluto-crats; Romanovs' trying to turn the clock back and America speeding it forward (or, feudalism versus capitalism); corporations having rights as individuals, an individual having absolute right; the KGB, the CIA; rule by elites, one by decree, the other in a popular vote; ever expanding territorial land grab towards their Pacific and Arctic meeting points; destinies pursued With God On Our Side and many more. Briefly, some things which the book does not contain. Although covert operations and democracy (in America) ...

... justify that spending. And so, as the Cold War ended, right on cue, up stepped 'terrorism' which had been kept warm since the late 1970s when it was put together by anti-communists seeking ways of keeping the Soviet 'threat' alive under conditions of détente (the world – terror – sponsored – by – the – KGB thesis) and by Israeli propagandists looking for sticks with which to beat the Palestinians. And since then this 'threat' has worked a treat, ramifying and multiplying into an new, vast, hydra-headed, near-invisible, global threat, justifying vast new expenditure and military and intelligence expansion all over the world. But threat ...

... op David Burke Woodbridge: the Boydell Press, 2008, h/b , £18.99 The author was conducting a series of interviews with 87-year old Melita Norwood about her childhood among a group of pro-Soviet radical exiles in England in the 1920s and 30s, when it was revealed in the press, via the KGB defector Metrokhin, that she had been a Soviet spy during and after WW2, leaking nuclear secrets. So Burke's research shifted its focus and this book is the result: partly the original study of the pro-Soviet exile left in Britain and the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and partly another go round the story ...

... Barnes, was that the stock was probably over half a million books. As Ronald Gray once responded to my request for books on espionage in The Bookdealer, 'we can supply anything you want on espionage, and much more. ' Over the years, he did! Hammersmith Books provided books to many customers world-wide, including the KGB 'illegal' Gordon Lonsdale, who, when he was in Winson Green Prison, began to write a definitive assessment of what SOE had actually achieved in World War II. Ronald was able to supply over 95% of the books Lonsdale wanted. In addition to second-handbook-selling, Hammersmith Books also reprinted several early important books ...